THE SIFTED 

GRAIN AND THE GRAIN 

SIFTERS 



By CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS 



REPRINTliD FROM THE 



3^mmcan Jli^torical ^(xitxc 



VOL. VI No. 2 



JANUARY iQoi 



'V7 



i c 



jReprinted from TiiK American Historical Review Vol. VI, No. 2, Jan., 1901.] 



THE SIFTED GRAIN AND THE GRAIN SIFTERS' 

ON occasions such as this, a text upon which to discourse is not 
usual ; I propose to venture an exception to the rule. I 
shall, moreover, offer not one text only, but two ; taken, the first, 
from a discourse prepared in the full theological faith of the seven- 
teenth century, the other from the most far-reaching scientific pub- 
lication of the century now drawing to its close. 

" God sifted a whole Nation that He might send choice Grain 
over into this Wilderness," said William Stoughton in the election 
sermon preached according to custom before the Great and Gen- 
eral Court of Massachusetts in April, 1668. To the same effect 
Charles Darwin wrote in 1871 : "There is apparently much truth 
in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as 
well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selec- 
tion ; for the more energetic, restless and courageous men from all 
parts of Europe have emigrated during the last ten or twelve gen- 
erations to that great country and have there succeeded best ; " and 
the quiet, epoch-marking, creed-shaking naturalist then goes on to 
express this startling judgment, which, uttered by an American, 
would have been deemed the very superlative of national vanity : 
— " Looking to the distant future, I do not think [it] an exagger- 
ated view [to say that] all other series of events — as that which 
resulted in the culture of mind in Greece, and that which resulted 
in the Empire of Rome — only appear to have purpose and value 
when viewed in connection with, or rather as subsidiary to, the 
great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration to the West." - 

Such are my texts ; but, while I propose to preach from them 
largely and to them in a degree, I am not here to try to instruct 

' An Address at the Dedication of the Building of the State Historical Society of 
Wisconsin at Madison, October 19, 1900. 

« The Descent of Man (ed. 1874), H. 218, 219. 

VOL. VI. — 14. ( 197 ) 



198 C. F. Adams 

you to-day in the history of your own state of Wisconsin, or in the 
magic record relating to the development of what we see fit to call 
the Northwest. Indeed I am not here as an individual at all ; nor 
as one in any way specially qualified to do justice to the occasion. 
I am here simply as the head for the time being of what is unques- 
tionably the oldest historical society in America, and, if reference is 
made to societies organized exclusively for the preservation of his- 
torical material and the furtherance of historical research, one than 
which few indeed anywhere in existence are more ancient of years. 
As the head of the Massachusetts Historical Society, I have been 
summoned to contribute what I may in honor of the completion 
of this edifice, the future home of a similar society, already no 
longer young ; — a society grown up in a country which, when 
the Massachusetts institution was formed, was yet the home of 
aboriginal tribes, — a forest-clad region known only to the frontiers- 
man and explorer. Under such circumstances, I did not feel that I 
had a right not to answer the call. It was as if in our older Massa- 
chusetts time the pastor of the Plymouth, or of the Salem or Boston 
church had been invited to the gathering of some new brotherhood 
in the Connecticut Valley, or the lighting of another candle of the 
Lord on the Concord or the Nashua, there to preach the sermon of 
ordination and extend the right hand of fellowship. 

And in this connection let me here mention one somewhat 
recondite historical circumstance relating to this locality. You 
here may be more curiously informed, but few indeed in Massa- 
chusetts are to-day knowing of the fact that this portion of Wis- 
consin — Madison itself, and all the adjoining counties — was once, 
territorially, a part of the royally assigned limits of Massachusetts. 
Yet such was undisputably the fact ; and it lends a certain propriet)', 
not the less poetic because remote, to my acceptance of the part here 
to-day assigned me. 

Accepting that part, I none the less, as I have said, propose to 
break away from what is the usage in such cases. That usage, if I 
may have recourse to an old theological formula, is to improve the 
occasion historically. An address, erudite and bristling with sta- 
tistics, would now be in order. An address in which the gradual 
growth of the community or the institution should be developed, 
and its present condition set forth ; with suitable reference to the 
days of small things, and a tribute of gratitude to the founders, and 
those who patiently built their lives into the edifice, and made of it 
their monument. The names of all such should, I agree, be cut 
deep over its portico ; but this task, eminently proper on such occa- 
sions, I, a stranger, shall not undertake here and now to perform. 




The Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters 1 99 

Yov it others are far better qualified. I do not, therefore, propose 
to tell you of the St. Francis Xavier mission at Green Bay, or 
of Nicollet ; of Jacques Cartier, of Marquette or of Radi.sson, any 
more than of those two devoted benefactors and assiduous secreta- 
ries of this institution, Lyman C. Draper and Reuben G. Thwaites ; 
but, leaving them, and their deeds and services, to be com- 
memorated by those to the manner born, and, consequently, in 
every respect better qualified than I for the work, I propose to turn 
to more general subjects and devote the time allotted me to gener- 
alities, and to the future rather than to the past. 

In an address delivered about eighteen months ago before the 
Massachusetts Historical Society, I discussed in some detail the 
modern conception of history as compared with that which formerly 
prevailed. I do not now propose to repeat what I then said. It is 
sufficient for my present purpose to call attention to what we of the 
new school regard as the dividing line between us and the historians 
of the old school, the first day of October, 1859, — the date of the 
publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species;" the book of his im- 
mediately preceding the " Descent of Man," from which my text for 
to-day was taken. On the first day of October, 1859, ^^'^^ Mosaic 
cosmogony finally gave place to the Darwinian theory of evolution. 
Under the new dispensation, based not on chance or an assumed 
supernatural revelation, but on a patient study of biology, that 
record of mankind known as history, no longer a mere succession 
of traditions and annals, has become a unified whole, — a vast 
scheme systematically developing to some result as yet not under- 
stood. Closely allied to astronomy, geology and physics, the study 
of modern history seeks a scientific basis from which the rise and 
fall of races and dynasties will be seen merely as phases of a con- 
secutive process of evolution, — the evolution of man from his initial 
to his ultimate state. When this conception was once reached, 
history, ceasing to be a mere narrative, made up of disconnected 
episodes having little or no bearing on each other, became a con- 
nected whole. To each development, each epoch, race and dynasty 
its proper place was to be assigned ; and to assign that place was 
the function of the historian. Formerly each episode was looked 
upon as complete in itself; and, being so, it had features more or 
less dramatic or instructive, and, for that reason, tempting to the 
historian, whether investigator or litcraiy artist, — a Freeman or a 
Froudc. Now, the first question the historian must put to himself 
relates to the proper adjustment of his particular theme to the en- 
tire plan, — he is shaping the fragment of a va.st mosaic. The in- 
comparably greater portion of history has, it is needless to say, 



200 C. F. Adams 

little value, — not much more than the biography of the average in- 
dividual ; it is a record of small accomplishment, — in many instances 
a record of no accomplishment at all, perhaps of retrogression ; — 
for we cannot all be successful, nor even everlastingly and effect- 
ively strenuous. Among nations in history, as among men we 
know, the commonplace is the rule ; but, whether ordinary or 
exceptional, — conspicuous or obscure, — each has its proper place, 
and to it that place should be assigned. 

Having laid down this principle, I, eighteen months ago, pro- 
ceeded to apply it to the society I was then addressing, and to the 
history of the commonwealth whose name that society bears ; and 
I gave my answer to it, such as that answer was. The same ques- 
tion I now put as concerns Wisconsin ; and to that also I propose 
to venture an answer. As my text has indicated, that answer, also, 
will not, in a sense, be lacking in ambition. In the history of Wis- 
consin I shall seek to find verification of what Darwin suggested, — 
evidence of the truth of the great law of natural selection as applied 
also to man. 

Thus stated, the theme is a large one, and may be approached 
in many ways ; and, in the first place, I propose to approach it in 
the way usual with modern historical writers. I shall attempt to 
assign to Wisconsin its place in the sequence of recent develop- 
ment ; for it is only during the last fifty years that Wisconsin has 
exercised any, even the most imperceptible, influence on what is 
conventionally agreed upon as history. That this region before 
the year 1 848 had an existence, we know ; as we also know that, 
since the last glacial period when the earth's surface hereabouts 
assumed its present geographical form, — some five thousand, or, 
perhaps, ten, or even twenty thousand years ago, — it has been occu- 
pied by human beings, — fire-making, implement-using, garment- 
wearing, habitation-dwelling. With these we have now nothing to 
do. We, the historians, are concerned only with what may be 
called the mere fringe of Time's raiment, — the last half-century 
of the fifty or one hundred centuries ; the rest belong to the eth- 
nologist and the geologist, not to us. But the last fifty years, 
again, so far as the evolution of man from a lower to a higher stage 
of development is concerned, though a very quickening period, has, 
after all, been but one stage, and not the final stage, of a distinct 
phase of development. That phase has now required four centuries 
in which to work itself out to the point as yet reached ; for it harks 
back to the discovery of America, and the movement towards reli- 
gious freedom which followed close upon that discovery, though 
having no direct connection with it. Martin Luther and Christo- 



The Sifted Grain and ike Grain Sifters 201 

pher Columbus had little in common except that their lives over- 
lapped ; but those two dates, 1492 and 15 17, — the landfall at San 
Salvador and the theses nailed on the church door at Wittenberg, — 
those two dates began a new chapter in human history, the chapter 
in which is recounted the fierce struggle over the establishment 
of the principles of civil and religious liberty, and the recognition 
of the equality of men before the law. For, speaking generally 
but with approximate correctness, it may be asserted that, prior to 
the year i 500, the domestic political action and the foreign compli- 
cations of even the most advanced nations turned on other issues, — 
dynastic, predatory, social ; but, since that date, from the wars 
of Charles V., of Francis I., and of Elizabeth down to our own 
Confederate rebellion, almost every great struggle or debate has 
either directly arisen out of some religious dispute or some demand 
for increased civil rights, or', if it had not there its origin, it has 
invariably gravitated in that direction. Even Frederick of Prussia, 
the so-called Great — that skeptical, irreligious cut-purse of the 
Empire, — the disciple and protector of Voltaire and the apotheo- 
sized of Thomas Carlyle, — even Frederick figured as " the Protes- 
tant Hero ; " while Francis I. was " the Eldest Son of the Church," 
and Henry VIII. received from Rpme the title of " Defender of the 
Faith." 

Since the year 1 500, on the other hand, what is known as 
modern history has been little more than a narrative of the episodes 
in the struggle not yet closed against arbitrary rule, whether by a 
priesthood or through divine right, or by the members of a caste or 
of a privileged class, — whether ennobled, plutocratic or industrial. 
The right of the individual man, no matter how ignorant or how 
poor, to think, worship and do as seems to him best, provided al- 
ways in so doing he does not infringe upon the rights of others, has 
through these four centuries been, as it still is, the underlying issue 
in every conflict. It seems likely, also, to continue to be the issue 
for a long time to come, for it never was more firmly asserted or 
sternly denied than now ; though to-day the opposition comes, not, 
as heretofore, from abo\-c, but from below, and finds its widest and 
most formidable expression in the teachings of those socialists who 
preach a doctrine of collectivism, or the complete suppression of 
the individual. 

That proposition, however, does not concern us here and now. 
Our business is with the middle period of the nineteenth century, 
and not with the first half of the twentieth ; and no matter how 
closely we confine ourselves to the subject in hand, space and time 
will scarcely be found in which properly to develop the theme. 



202 C. F. Adams 

Two and fifty years ago, when, in the summer of 1 848, Wisconsin 
first took shape as an organized pohtical organization, — a new factor 
in man's development, — -human evolution was laboring over two 
problems, — nationality and slaver}'. Slavery — that is, the owner- 
ship of one man or one class of men by another man or class of 
men — had existed, and been accepted as a matter of course, from 
the beginning. Historically the proposition did not admit of doubt. 
In Great Britain, bondage had only recently disappeared, and in 
Russia it was still the rule ; while among the less advanced nations 
its rightfulness was nowhere challenged. With us here in America it 
was a question of race. The equality of whites before the law was 
an article of political faith ; not so that of the blacks. The Afri- 
cans were distinctly an inferior order of being, and, as such, not 
only in the Southern or slave states, but throughout the North 
also, not entitled to the unrestricted pursuit on equal terms of life, 
liberty and happiness. Hence a fierce contention, — the phase, as it 
presented itself on the land discovered by Columbus in 1492, of the 
struggle inaugurated by Luther in 1517. Its work was thus, so to 
speak, cut out for Wisconsin in advance of its being, — its place in 
the design of the great historical scheme prenatally assigned to it. 
How then did it address itself to its task ? how perform the work 
thus given it to do ? Did it, standing in the front rank of progress, 
help the great scheme along ? Or, identifying itself with that reac- 
tionist movement ever on foot, did it strive with the stars in their 
courses ? 

Here, in the United States, the form in which the issue of the 
future took shape between 1830, when it first presented itself, and 
1848, when Wisconsin entered the sisterhood of states, is even yet 
only partially understood, in such occult ways did the forces of 
development interact and exercise influence on each other. For 
reasons not easy to explain, also, certain states came forward as the 
more active exponents of antagonistic ideas, — on the one side Mas- 
sachusetts ; on the other, first, Virginia, and, later. South Carolina. 
The great and long sustained debate which closed in an appeal to 
force in the spring of 1861 must now be conceded as something 
well-nigh inevitable from fundamental conditions which dated from 
the beginning. It was not a question of slavery ; it was one of 
nationality. The issue had presented itself over and over again, in 
various forms and in different parts of the country ever since the 
Constitution had been adopted, — now in Pennsylvania ; now in Ken- 
tucky ; now in New England ; even here in Wisconsin ; but, in its 
most concrete form, in South Carolina. It was a strusrcrle for mas- 
tery between centripetal and centrifugal forces. At the close, slavery 



The Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters 203 

was, it is true, the immediate cause of quarrel, but the seat of dis- 
turbance lay deeper. In another country, and under other condi- 
tions, it was the identical struggle which, in feudal times, went on in 
Great Britain, in France and in Spain, and which, more recently, and 
in our own day only, we have seen brought to a close in Germany 
and in Italy, — the struggle of a rising spirit of nationality to over- 
come the clannish instinct, — the desire for local independence. In 
the beginning Virginia stood forward as the exponent of state sover- 
eignty. Jefferson was its mouthpiece. It was he who drew up the 
famous Kentucky resolutions of 1798-99, and his election to the 
presidency in 1800 was the recognized victory of the school of 
states' rights over Federalism. Later the parties changed sides, — 
as political parties are wont to do. Possession of the government 
led to a marked modification of views ; new issues were presented ; 
and, in 1807, the policy which took shape in Jefferson's Embargo 
converted the Federalist into a disunion organization, which disap- 
peared from existence in the famous Hartford Convention of 18 14-1 5. 
New England was then the centre of the party of the centrifugal 
force, and the issues were commercial. Fortunately, up to 18 15 
the issue between the spirit of local sovereignty and the ever-grow- 
ing sense of nationality had not taken shape over any matter of dif- 
ference sufficiently great and far-reaching to provoke an appeal to 
force. Not the less for that was the danger of conflict there, — a 
sufficient cause and suitable occasion only were wanting, and those 
under ordinary conditions might be counted upon to present them- 
selves in due course of time. They did present themselves in 1832, 
still under the economical guise. But now the moral issue lurked 
behind, though the South did not yet stand directly opposed to the 
advancing spirit of the age. But nullification — the logical outcome 
of the theory of absolute state sovereignty — was enunciated by Cal- 
houn, and South Carolina took from Virginia the lead in the reaction- 
ary movement from nationality. The danger once more passed 
away ; but it is obvious to us now, and, it would seem, should have 
been plain to any cool-headed observer then, that, when the issue 
next presented itself, a trial of strength would be well-nigh inevi- 
table. The doctrine of state sovereignty, having assumed the shape 
of nullification, would ne.xt develop that of secession, and the direct 
issue over nationality would be presented. 

Almost before the last indications of danger over the economical 
question had disappeared, slavery loomed ominously up. They did 
not realize it at the time, but it was now an angry wrangle over a 
step in the progressive evolution of the human race. The equality 
of man before the law and his Maker was insisted upon, and was 



204 C. F. Adams 

denied. It was a portentous issue, for in it human destiny was 
challenged. The desperate risk the Southern States then took is 
plain enough now. They entered upon a distinctly reactionary 
movement against two of the foremost growing forces of human 
development, the tendency to nationality and the humanitarian spirit. 
Though they knew it not, they were arraying themselves against the 
very stars in their courses. 

Under these circumstances the secession-slavery movement be- 
tween 1835 and i860 was a predestined failure. Because of fortu- 
itous events — the chances of the battle-field, the impulse of indi- 
vidual genius, the exigencies of trade or the blunders of diplomats 
— it might easily have had an apparent and momentary triumph ; but 
the result upon which the slave power, as such, was intent, — the 
creation about the Gulf of Mexico and in the Antilles of a great 
semi-tropical nationality, based on African servitude and a monop- 
olized cotton production, — this result was in direct conflict with 
the irresistible tendencies of mankind in its present stage of develop- 
ment. A movement in all its aspects radically reactionary, it could 
at most have resulted only in a passing anomaly. 

While the Southern, or Jamestown, column of Darwin's great 
Anglo-Saxon migration was thus following to their legitimate conclu- 
sions the teachings of Jefferson and Calhoun, — the Virginia and South 
Carolina schools of state sovereignty, slavery and secession, — the 
distinctively northern column, — that entering through the Ply- 
mouth and Boston portals, — instinctively adhering to those princi- 
ples of Church and State in the contention over which it originated, 
— found its way along the southern shores of the Great Lakes, 
through northern Ohio, southern Michigan, and northern Illinois, 
and then, turning north and west, spread itself over the vast region 
beyond the great lakes, and towards the upper waters of the Miss- 
issippi. But it is very noteworthy how the lead and inspiration 
in this movement still came from the original source. While in the 
South it passed from Virginia to Carolina, in the North it remained 
in Massachusetts. Three men then came forward there, voicing 
more clearly than any or all others what was in the mind of the 
community in the way of aspiration, whether moral or political. 
Those three were : William Lloyd Garrison, Daniel Webster and 
John Quincy Adams ; they were the prophetic voices of that phase 
of American political evolution then in process. Their messages, 
too, were curiously divergent ; and yet, apparently contradictory, 
they were, in reality, supplementary to each other. Garrison de- 
veloped the purely moral side of the coming issue. Webster 
preached nationality, under the guise of love of the Union. Adams, 



The Si/led Grain and tJie Grain Sifters 205 

combining the two, pointed out a way to the establishment of the 
rights of man under the Constitution and within the Union. While, in 
a general way, much historical interest attaches to the utterances 
and educational influence of those three men during the period 
under discussion, the future political attitude of Wisconsin, then 
nascent, was deeply affected by them. To this subject, therefore, I 
propose to devote some space ; for, deserving attention, I am not 
aware that it has heretofore received it. In doing so I cannot 
ignore the fact of my own descent from one of the three I have 
named ; but I may say in my own extenuation that John Quincy 
Adams was indisputably a considerable public character in his time, 
and when I, a descendant of his, undertake to speak of that time 
historically, I must, when he comes into the field of discussion, deal 
with him as best I may, assigning to him, as to his contemporaries, 
the place which, as I see it, is properly his or theirs. Moreover, 
I will freely acknowledge that an hereditary affiliation, if I may 
so express it, was not absent from the feeling which impelled me 
to accept your call. However much others had forgotten it, I 
well remembered that more than half a century' ago, in the days 
of small things, it was in this region, as in central New York and 
the Western Reserve, that the seed cast by one from whom I 
claim descent fell in the good ground where it bore fruit an hun- 
dred fold. 

Recurring, then, to the three men I have named as voicing sys- 
tematically a message of special significance in connection with the 
phase of political evolution, or of development if that word is pre- 
ferred, then going on, — Garrison's message was distinctly moral 
and humanitarian. In a sense, it was reactionary, and violently so. 
In it there was no appeal to patriotism, no recognition even of 
nationality. On the contrary', in the lofty atmosphere of humani- 
tarianism in which he had his being, I doubt if Garrison ever in- 
haled a distinctively patriotic breath ; while he certainly denounced 
the Constitution and assailed the Union. He saw only the moral 
wrong of slavery, its absolute denial of the fundamental principle 
of the equality of men before the law and before God ; and the 
world became his, — where freedom was there was his country. To 
arouse the dormant conscience of the community by the fierce and 
unceasing denunciation of a great wrong was his mission ; and he 
fulfilled it ; but, curiously enough, the end he labored for came in 
the way he least foresaw, and through the very instrumentality he 
had most vehemently denounced, — it came within that Union which 
he had described as a compact with death, and under that Constitu- 
tion which he had arraigned as a covenant with hell. Yet Garri- 



2o6 C. F. Adams 

son was undeniably a prophet, voicing the gospel as he saw it fear- 
lessly and without pause. As such he contributed potently to the 
final result. 

Next, Webster. It was the mission of Daniel Webster to preach 
nationality. In doing so he spoke in words of massive eloquence 
in direct harmony with the most pronounced aspiration of his time, 
— that aspiration which has asserted itself and worked the most 
manifest results of the nineteenth century in both hemispheres, — 
in Spain and Prussia during the Napoleonic war, in Russia during 
the long Sclavonic upheaval, again more recently in Germany and 
in Italy, and finally in the United States. The names of Stein, of 
Cavour and of Bismarck are scarcely more associated with this 
great instinctive movement of the century than is that of Daniel 
Webster. His mission it was to preach to this people Union, one 
'and indivisible ; and he delivered his message. 

The mission of J. Q. Adams during his best and latest years, 
while a combination of that of the two others, was different from 
either. His message, carefully thought out, long retained, and at 
last distinctly enunciated, was his answer to the Jeffersonian theory 
of state sovereignty, and Calhoun's doctrine of nullification and 
its logical outcome, secession. With both theory and doctrine, 
and their results, he had during his long political career been con- 
fronted ; on both he had reflected much. It was during the admin- 
istration of Jefferson and on the question of union that he had, in 
1807, broken with his party and resigned from the Senate ; and 
with Calhoun he had been closely associated in the cabinet of Mon- 
roe. Calhoun also had occupied the vice-presidential chair during 
his own administration. He now met Calhoun face to face on the 
slavery issue, prophetically proclaiming a remedy for the moral wrong 
and the vindication of the rights of man, within the Union and 
under the Constitution, through the exercise of inherent war powers 
whenever an issue between the sections should assume the insur- 
rectionary shape. In other words. Garrison's moral result was to 
be secured, not through the agencies Garrison advocated, but by 
force of that nationality which W^ebster proclaimed. This solution 
of the issue, J. O. Adams never wearied of enunciating, early and 
late, by act, speech and letter ; and his view prevailed in the end. 
Lincoln's proclamation of January, 1863, was but the formal decla- 
ration of the policy enunciated by J. Q. Adams on the floor of 
Congress in 1836, and again in 1841, and yet again in greater de- 
tail in 1842.' It was he who thus brought the abstract moral doc- 
trines of Garrison into unison of movement with the nationality of 
Webster. 

' See Appendix, post. 



The Sifted Gj-ain and the drain Si/iers 207 

The time now drew near when Wisconsin was to take her place 
in the Union, and exert her share of influence on the national polity, 
and through that polity on a phase of political evolution. South 
Carolina, by the voice of Calhoun, was preaching reaction, through 
slavery and in defiance of nationality : Massachusetts, through Gar- 
rison and Webster, was proclaiming the moral idea and nationality 
as abstractions ; while J. Q. Adams confronted Calhoun with the 
ominous contention that, the instant he or his had recourse to 
force, that instant the moral wrong could be made good by the 
sword wielded in defence of nationality and in the name of the Con- 
stitution. 

As 1S48 waxed old, the debate grew angry. J. Q. Adams 
died in the early months of that memorable year ; but his death in 
no way affected the course of events. The leadership in the anti- 
slavery struggle on the floor of Congress and within the limits of the 
Constitution had passed from him four years before. He was too 
old longer to bear the weight of armor, or to wield weapons once 
familiar ; but the effect of his teachings remained, and they were 
living realities wherever the New England column had penetrated, 
— throughout central New York, in the " Western Reserve," and 
especially in the region which bordered on Lake Michigan. Gar- 
rison still declaimed against the Union as an unholy alliance with 
sin ; while, in the mind of Webster, his sense of the wrong of 
slavery was fast being overweighted by apprehension for nationality. 
In the mean time, a war of criminal aggression against Mexico in 
behalf of Calhoun's reactionary movement had been brought to a 
close, and the question was as to the partition of plunder. On that 
great issues hinged, and over it was fought the presidental election 
of 1848. A little more than fifty years ago, that was the first elec- 
tion in which Wisconsin participated. The number of thos2 who 
now retain a distinct recollection of the canvass of 1S48, and the 
questions then so earnestly debated are not many ; I chance to be 
one of those few. I recall one trifling incident connected, not with 
the canvass but with the events of that year, which, for some reason, 
made an impression upon me, and now illustrates curiously the re- 
moteness of the time. I have said that J. Q. Adams died in Feb- 
ruary, 1848. Carried back with much funereal state from the 
Capitol at Washington to Massachusetts, he was in March buried 
at Quincy. An eloquent discourse was then delivered ov^er his 
grave by the minister of the church of which the ex-President had 
been a member. He who delivered it was a scholar, as well as a 
natural orator of high order; and, in the course of what he said he 
had occasion to refer to this remote region, then not yet admitted 



2o8 C. F. Adams 

to statehood, and he did so under the name of " the Ouisconsin." 
That discourse was deHvered on the i ith of March, 1S48 ; and, on 
the 29th of the following May, Wisconsin became a State. 

Returning now to the presidential election of 1848, it will be 
found that Wisconsin, the youngest community in the Union, came 
at once to the front as the banner state of the West in support of 
the principles on which the Union was established, and the main- 
tenance and vindication of those fundamental principles within the 
Union and through the Constitution. In that canvass the great 
issues of the future were distinctly brought to the front. The old 
party organizations then still confronted each other, — the Henry 
Clay Whigs were over against the Jacksonian Democracy ; but in 
that election Lewis Cass, the legitimate candidate of the De- 
mocracy, — a Northern man with Southern principles, — so far as 
African slavery was concerned a distinct reactionist from the prin- 
ciples of the great Declaration of 1776, — Lewis Cass, of Michigan, 
was opposed to General Zachary Taylor, of Louisiana, himself a 
slaveholder, and nominated by a party which in presenting his name 
carefully abstained from any enunciation of political principles. He 
was an unknown political quantity ; and no less a public character 
than Daniel Webster characterized his nomination as one not fit to 
be made. It yet remained to be seen that, practically, the plain, 
blunt, honest, well-meaning old soldier made an excellent President, 
whose premature loss was deeply and with reason deplored. His 
nomination, however, immediately after that of Cass, proved the 
signal for revolt. For the disciples of J. O. Adams in both political 
camps it was as if the cry had again gone forth, " To your tents, O 
Israel ! " — and a first fierce blast of the coming storm then swept 
across the land. In August the dissentients met in conference at 
Buffalo, and there first enunciated the principles of the American 
political party of the future, — that party which, permeated by the 
sentiment of Nationality, was destined to do away with slavery 
through the war power, and to incorporate into the Constitution the 
principle of the equality of man before the law, irrespective of color 
or of race. Now, more than half a century after the event, it may 
fairly be said of those concerned in the Buffalo movement of 1848 
that they were destined to earn in the fulness of time the rare dis- 
tinction of carrying mankind forward one distinct stage in the long 
process of evolution. In support of that movement Wisconsin was, 
as I have already said, the banner western state. In its action it 
simply responded to its early impulse received from New England 
and western New York. Thus the seed fell in fertile places and 
produced fruit an hundred fold. The law of natural selection, 
though not yet formulated, was at work. 



The Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters 209 

The election returns of 1848 tell the story. They are still elo- 
quent. The heart of the movement of that year lay in Massa- 
chusetts and Vermont. In those two states, taken together, the 
party of the future polled, in 1848, a little over 28 per cent, of the 
aggregate vote cast. In Wisconsin it polled close upon 27 per 
cent. ; and this 27 per cent, in Wisconsin is to be compared with 15 
per cent, in Michigan, 12 per cent, in Illinois, less than II percent, 
in Ohio, and not 4 per cent, in the adjoining state of Iowa. In the 
three neighboring states of Michigan, Illinois and Iowa, taken to- 
gether, the new movement gathered into itself 1 2 per cent, of the 
total voting constituency, while in Wisconsin it counted, as I have 
said, over 26 per cent. Thus, in 184S, Wisconsin was the Ver- 
mont of the West ; sending to Congress as one of its three repre- 
sentatives Charles Durkcc, a son of Vermont, the first distinctively 
anti-slavery man from the Northwest. Wisconsin remained the 
Vermont of the West. From its very origin not the smallest doubt 
attached to its attitude. It emphasized it in words when in 1849 it 
instructed one of its senators at Washington "to immediately resign 
his seat " because he had " outraged the feelings of the people " by 
dalliance with the demands of the slave power ; it emphasized it by 
action when five years later its highest judicial tribunal did not hesi- 
tate to declare the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 "unconstitutional 
and void." At the momentous election of i860, Wisconsin threw 
56 per cent, of its vote in favor of the ticket bearing the name of 
Abraham Lincoln ; nor did the convictions of the state weaken 
under the test of war. In 1864, when Wisconsin had sent into the 
field over 90,000 enlisted men to maintain the Union, and to make 
effective the most extreme doctrine of war powers under the Consti- 
tution, — even then, in the fourth year of severest stress, Wisconsin 
again threw 55 per cent, of its popular vote for the re-election of 
Linc^' . A year later the struggle ended. Throughout the ordeal 
Wis -onsin never faltered. 

Of the record made by Wisconsin in the Civil War, I am not here 
to speak. That field has been sufficiently covered, and covered by 
those far better qualified than I to work in it. I will only say, in 
often quoted words, that none then died more reely or in greater 
glory than those Wisconsin sent into the field, though then many 
died, and there was much glory. When figures so speak, comment 
weakens. Look at the record : — Fifty-seven regiments and thirteen 
batteries in the field ; a death-roll exceeding 12,000; a Wisconsin 
regiment (2d) first in that roll of honor which tells off the regiments 
of the Union which suffered most, and two other Wisconsin regi- 
ments (7th and 26th), together, fifth ; while a brigade made up three- 



2 1 o C. F. Adams 

quarters of Wisconsin battalions shows the heaviest aggregate loss 
sustained during the war by any similar command, and is hence 
known in the history of the struggle as the " Iron Brigade." Thir- 
teen Wisconsin regiments participated in Grant's brilliant move- 
ment on Vicksburg ; five were with Thomas at Chickamauga ; seven 
with Sherman at Mission Ridge ; and, finally, eleven marched with 
him to the sea, while four remained behind to strike with Thomas 
at Nashville. Thus it may truly be said that wherever, between the 
13th of April, 1861, and the 26th of April, 1865, death was reap- 
ing its heaviest harvest, — whether in Pennsylvania, in Virginia, in 
Tennessee, in Mississippi, in Georgia, — at Shiloh, at Corinth, at 
Antietam, at Gettysburg, in the salient at Spottsylvania, in the death- 
trap at Petersburg, or in the Peninsula slaughter-pen, — wherever 
during those awful years the dead lay thickest, there the men from 
Wisconsin were freely laying down their lives. 

It is, however, no part of my present purpose to set forth here 
your sacrifices in the contest of 1861-65. What I have undertaken 
to do is to assign to Wisconsin its proper and relative place as a 
factor in one of the great evolutionary movements of man. As the 
twig was bent, the tree inclined. The sacrifices of Wisconsin life 
and treasure between 1861 and 1865 were but the fulfilment of the 
promise given by Wisconsin in 1848. The state, it is true, at no 
time during that momentous struggle rose to a position of unchal- 
lenged leadership either in the field or the council chamber. Among 
its representatives it did not number a Lincoln or a Sherman ; but 
it did supply in marked degree that greatest and most necessary 
of all essentials in every evolutionaiy crisis, a well-developed and 
thoroughly distributed popular backbone. 

This racial characteristic, also, I take to be the one great essen- 
tial to the success of our American experiment. In every emer- 
gency which arises there is always the cry raised for a strong hand 
at the helm, — the ship of state is invariably declared to be hope- 
lessly drifting. But it is in just those times of crisis that a widely 
diffused individuality proves the greatest possible safeguard, — the 
only reliable public safeguard. It is then with the state as it is with 
a strong, seaworthy ship manned by a hardy and experienced crew, 
in no way dependent on the one pilot who may chance to be at the 
wheel. In any stress of storm, the ship's company will prove equal 
to the occasion, and somehow provide for its own salvation. Under 
similar political conditions a community asserts, in the long run, its 
superiority to the accidents of fortune, — the aberrations due to the 
influence of individual genius, those winning numbers in the lottery 
of fate, — and evinces that staying power, which, no less now and 



The Sifted Grain and the Graiti Sifters 2 1 1 

here than in Rome and Great Britain, is the only safe rock of empire. 
The race thus educated and endowed is the masterful race, — the 
master of its own destiny, it is master of the destiny of others ; and 
of that crowning republican quality, Wisconsin, during our period of 
national trial, showed herself markedly possessed. While individ- 
uals were not exceptional, the average was unmistakably high. 

And this I hold to be the highest tribute which can be paid to a 
political community. It implies all else. Unless I greatly err, this 
characteristic has, in the case of Wisconsin, a profound and scientific 
significance of the most far-reaching character ; and so I find myself 
brought back to my text. As I have already more than once said, 
others are in every way better qualified than I to speak intelligently 
of the Wisconsin stock, — of the elements which enter into the brain 
and bone and sinew of the race now holding as its abiding-place and 
breeding-ground the region lying between Lake Michigan and the 
waters of the upper Mississippi, — between the state of Illinois on the 
south and Lake Superior on the north. I speak chiefly from im- 
pression, and always subject to correction ; but my understanding is 
that this region was in the main peopled by men and women repre- 
senting in their persons what there was of the more enterprising 
adventurous and energetic of three of the most thoroughly virile 
and, withal, moral and intellectual branches of the human family, — 
I refer to the Anglo-Saxon of New England descent, and to the 
Teutonic and the Scandinavian families. Tough of fibre and tena- 
cious of principle, the mixed descendants from those races were well 
calculated to illustrate the operation of a natural law ; and I have 
quite failed in my purpose if I have not improved this occasion to 
point out how in the outset of their political life as a community 
they illustrated the force of Stoughton's utterance and the truth of 
Darwin's remarkable generalization. By their attitude and action, 
at once intelligent and decided, they left their imprint on that par- 
ticular phase of human evolution which then presented itself They^ 
in so doing, assigned to Wisconsin its special place and work in the 
great scheme of development, and forecast its mission in the future. 

I have propounded an historical theory ; it is for others, better 
advised, having passed upon it, to confirm or reject. 



There are many other topics which might here and now be dis- 
cussed, perhaps advantageously, — topics closely connected with this 
edifice and with the occasion, — topics relating to libraries, the accu- 
mulation of historical material, and methods of work in connection 
with it ; but space and time alike forbid. A selection must be 



2 12 C. F. Adams 

made, and, in making my selection, I go back to the fact that, rep- 
resenting one historical society, I am here at the behest of another 
historical society ; and matters relating to what we call " history " 
are, therefore, those most germane to the day. Coming, then, here 
from the East to a point which, in the great future of our American 
development, — a century, or, perchance, two or three centuries 
hence, — may not unreasonably look forward to being the seat of 
other methods and a higher learning, I propose to pass over the 
more obvious, and, possibly, the more useful, even if more modest, 
subjects of discussion, and to try my hand at one which, even if it 
challenges controversy, is indisputably suggestive. I refer to cer- 
tain of the more marked of those tendencies which characterize the 
historical work of the day. Having dealt with the sifted grain, I 
naturally come to speak of those who have told the tale of the sift- 
ing. Looking back, from the standpoint of 1 900, over the harvested 
sheaves which stud the fields we have traversed, the retrospect is 
not to me altogether satisfactory. In fact, taken as a whole, our 
histories^I speak of those written by the dead only — have not, I 
submit, so far as we are concerned, fully met the requirements of 
time and place. Literary masterpieces, scientific treatises, philo- 
sophical disquisitions, sometimes one element predominates, some- 
times another ; but in them all something is wanting. That some- 
thing I take to be an adequately developed literary sense. 

In dealing with this subject, I am well aware my criticism might 
take a wider range. I need not confine myself to history, inasmuch 
as, in the matter of literary sense, the shortcomings, or the ex- 
cesses, rather, of the American writer are manifest. In the Greek, 
and in the Greek alone, this sense seems to have been instinctive. 
He revealed it, and he revealed it at once, in poetry, in architecture 
and in art, as he revealed it in the composition of history. Of 
Homer we cannot speak ; but Herodotus ar'' Phidias died within 
six years of each other, each a father in his caluug With us Amer- 
icans that intuitive literary sense, resulting in the perfection of liter- 
ary form seems not less conspicuous for its absence than it was 
conspicuous for its presence among the Greeks. In literature the 
American seems to exist in a medium of stenographers and type- 
writers, and with a public printer at his beck and call. To such a 
degree is this the case that the expression I have just used — literary 
form — has, to many, and those not the least cultured, ceased to 
carry a meaning. Literary form they take to mean what they know 
as style ; while style is, with them, but another term for word- 
painting. Accordingly, with altogether too many of our American 
writers, to be voluminous and verbose is to be great. They would 



77/1? Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters 2 1 3 

conquer by force of numbers — the number of words they use. I, 
the other day, chanced across a curious illustration of this in the 
diary of my father. Returning from his long residence in luigland 
at the time of the Civil War, he attended some ceremonies held in 
Boston in honor of a public character who had died shortly before. 
" The eulogy," he wrote, " was good, but altogether too long. 
There is in all the American style of composition a tendency to dif- 
fuseness, and the repetition of the same ideas, which materially im- 
pairs the force of what is said. I see it the more clearly from hav- 
ing been so long out of the atmosphere." 

The failing is national ; nor in this respect does the American 
seem to profit by experience. Take, for instance, the most im- 
portant of our public documents, the inaugurals of our Presidents. 
We are a busy people ; yet our newly elected Presidents regu- 
larly inflict on us small volumes of information, and this, too, not- 
withstanding the fact that in the long line of inaugural common- 
places but one utterance stands out in memory, and that one the 
shortest of all, — the immortal second of Lincoln. Our present 
chief magistrate found himself unable to do justice to the occasion^ 
in his last annual message, in less than eighteen thousand words ; 
and in the Congress to which this message was addressed, two 
senators, in discussing the "paramount " issue of the day, did so, 
the one in a speech of sixty-five thousand words, the other in a 
speech of fifty-five thousand. Webster replied to Hayne in thirty- 
five thousand ; and Webster then did not err on the side of brevity. 
So in the presidential canvass now in progress. Mr. Bryan accepted 
his nomination in a comparatively brief speech of nine thousand 
words ; and this speech was followed by a letter of five thousand, 
covering omissions because of previous brevity. President McKin- 
ley, in his turn, then accepted a renomination in a letter of twelve 
thousand words, — a letter actually terse when compared with his 
last annual message ; but which Mr. Carl Schurz subsequently pro- 
ceeded to comment on in a vigorous address of fourteen thousand 
words. Leviathans in language, we Americans need to be Methu- 
selahs in years. It was not always so. The contrast is, indeed, 
noticeable. Washington's first inaugural numbered twenty-three 
hundred words. Including that now in progress, my memory 
covers fourteen presidential canvasses ; and by far the most gener- 
ally applauded and effective letter of acceptance put forth by any 
candidate during all those canvasses was that of General Grant in 
1868. Including address and signature, it was comprised in e.x- 
actly two hundred and thirty words. With a brevity truly com- 
mendable, even if military, he used one word where his civilian 

VOL. VI. — 15. 



2 14 C. F. Adams 

successor found occasion for fifty -two. As to the opponent of that 
civiHan successor, he sets computation at defiance. Indeed, speak- 
ing of Mr. Bryan purely from the historical standpoint, I seriously 
doubt whether, in all human experience, any man ever before gave 
utterance to an equal number of words in the same space of time. 

Leaving illustration, however, and returning to my theme, I will 
now say that in the whole long and memorable list of distinctively 
American literary men, — authors, orators, poets and story-tellers, — 
I recall but three who seem to me to have been endowed with a 
sense of form, at once innate and Greek ; those three were Daniel 
Webster, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yet, unless 
moulded by that instinctive sense of form, nothing can be perma- 
nent in literature any more than in sculpture, in painting or in archi- 
tecture. Not size, nor solidity, nor fidelity of work, nor knowledge 
of detail will preserve the printed volume any more than they will 
preserve the canvass or the edifice ; and this I hold to be just as 
true of history as of the oration, the poem or the drama. 

Surely, then, our histories need not all, of necessity, be de- 
signed for students and scholars exclusively ; and yet it is a note- 
worthy fact that even to-day, after scholars and story-tellers have 
been steadily at work upon it for nearly a centur\' and a half, — 
ever since David Hume and Oliver Goldsmith brought forth their 
classic renderings, — the chief popular knowledge of over three 
centuries of English history between John Plantagenet (1200) and 
Elizabeth Tudor (1536) is derived from the pages of Shakespeare. 
There is also a curious theory now apparently in vogue in our uni- 
versity circles, that, in some inscrutable way, accuracy as to fact 
and a judicial temperament are inconsistent with a highly developed 
literary sense. Erudition and fairness are the qualities in vogue, 
while form and brilliancy are viewed askance. Addressing now an 
assembly made up, to an unusual extent, of those engaged in the 
work of instruction in history, I wish to suggest that this marked 
tendency of the day is in itself a passing fashion, and merely a 
reactionary movement against the influence of two great literary 
masters of the last generation,-*— Macaulay and Carlyle. That the 
reaction had reason, I would by no means deny ; but, like most 
decided reactions, has it not gone too far ? Because men weary of 
brilliant colors, and mere imitators try to wield the master's brush, 
it by no means follows that art does not find its highest expression 
in Titian and Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Claude and Turner. It is the 
same with history. Profound scholars, patient investigators, men 
of a judicial turn of mind, subtile philosophers and accurate annal- 
ists empty forth upon a patient, because somewhat indifferent, read- 



The Sifted Grain and the Graitt Sifters 2 1 5 

ing public volume after volume ; but the great masters of literary 
form, in history as in poetry, alone retain their hold. Thucydides, 
Tacitus and Gibbon are always there, on a level with tlic eye ; while 
those of their would-be successors who find tiicmselves unable to 
tell us what they know, in a way in which we care to hear it, or 
within limits consistent with human life, are (]uictly relegated to the 
oblivion of the topmost shelf 

I fear that I am myself in danger of sinning somewhat flagrantly 
against the canons I have laid down. Exceeding my allotted space, 
I am conscious of disregarding any correct rule of form by my 
attempt at dealing with more subjects than it is possible on one 
occasion adequately to discuss. None the less I cannot resist the 
temptation, — I am proving myself an American ; and having gone 
thus far, I will now go on to the end, even though alone. There 
are, I hold, three elements which enter into the make-up of the ideal 
historian, whether him of the past or him of the future ; — these three 
are learning, judgment and the literary sense. A perfect history, 
like a perfect poem, must have a beginning, a middle and an end ; 
and the well proportioned parts should be kept in strict subservience 
to the whole. The dress, also, should be in keeping with the sub- 
stance ; and both subordinated to the conception. Attempting no 
display of erudition, pass the great historical literatures and names 
in rapid review, and see in how few instances all these canons were 
observed. And first, the Hebrew. While the Jew certainly was 
not endowed with the Greek's sense of form in sculpture, in painting 
or in architecture, in poetry and music he was, and has since been, 
pre-eminent. His philosophy and his history found their natural 
expression through his aptitudes. The result illustrates the supreme 
intellectual power exercised by art. Of learning and judgment there 
is only pretense ; but imagination and power are there : and, even to 
this day, the Hebrew historical writings are a distinct literature, — we 
call them "The Sacred Books." We have passed from under that 
superstition ; and yet it still holds a traditional sway. The books of 
Moses are merely a first tentative effort on the road subsequently 
trodden by Herodotus, Livy and Voltaire ; but their author was so 
instinct with imagination and such a master of form that to this day 
his narrative is read and accepted as history by more human beings 
than are all the other historical works in existence combined in one 
mass. No scholar or man of reflection now believes that Moses 
was any more inspired than Homer, Julius C.'Esar or Thomas Car- 
lyle ; but the imagination and intellectual force of the man, combined 
with his instinct for literary form, sufficed to secure for what he 
wrote a unique mastery only in our day shaken. 



2i6 C. F. Adams 

The Greek follows hard upon the Jew ; and of the Greek I have 
already said enough. He had a natural sense of art in all its shapes ; 
and, when it came to writing history, Herodotus, Thucydides and 
Xenophon seemed mere evolutions. Of the three, Thucydides 
alone combined in perfection the qualities of erudition, judgment 
and form ; but to the last-named element, their literary form, it is 
that all three owe their immortality. 

It is the same with the Romans — Livy, Sallust, Tacitus. The 
Roman had not that artistic instinct so noticeable in the Greek. He 
was, on the contrary, essentially a soldier, a ruler and organizer ; and 
a literary imitator. Yet now and again even in art he attained a 
proficiency which challenged his models. Cicero has held his own 
with Demosthenes ; and Virgil, Horace and Juvenal survive, each 
through a mastery of form. Tacitus, it is needless to say, is the 
Latin Thucydides. In him again, five centuries after Thucydides, 
the three essentials are combined in the highest degree. The orbs 
of the great historical constellation are wide apart, — the interval that 
divided Tacitus from Thucydides is the same as that which divided 
Matthew Paris from Edward Gibbon ; — twice that which divides 
Shakespeare from Tennyson. 

Coming rapidly down to modern times, of the three great lan- 
guages fruitful in historical work, — the French, English and Ger- 
man, — those writing in the first have alone approached the aptitude 
for form natural to the Greeks ; but in Gibbon only of those who 
have, in the three tongues, devoted themselves to historical work, 
were all the cardinal elements of historical greatness found united 
in such a degree as to command general assent to his pre-eminence. 
The Germans are remarkable for erudition, and have won respect 
for their judgment; but their disregard of form has been innate, — 
indicative either of a lack of perception or of contempt' Their work 
accordingly will hardly prove enduring. The French, from Voltaire 
down, have evinced a keener perception of form, nor have they 
been lacking in erudition. Critical and quick to perceive, they 
have still failed in any one instance to combine the three great 
attributes each in its highest degree. Accordingly, in the historical 
firmament they count no star of the first magnitude. Their lights 
have been meteoric rather than permanent. 

In the case of Great Britain it is interesting to follow the familiar 

' " Not only does a German writer possess, as a rule, a full measure of the patient 
industry which is required for thinking everything that may be thought about his theme, 
and knowing what others have thought ; he alone, it seems, when he comes to write a 
book about it, is imbued with the belief that that book ought necessarily to be a complete 
compendium of everything that has been so thought, whether by himself or others." 
The Atkeiiuiim, September 8, 1900, p. 303. 



The Sifted Grain and the Grai^i Sifters 2 1 7 

names, noting the shortcoming of each. The roll scarcely extends 
beyond the century, — Hume, Robertson and Gibbon constituting 
the solitary remembered exceptions. Of Gibbon, I have already 
spoken. He combined in highest degree all the elements of the 
historian, — in as great a degree as Thucydidcs or Tacitus. He was 
an orb of the first order ; and it was his misfortune that he was 
born and wrote before Darwin gave to history unity and a scheme. 
Hume was a subtle philosopher, and his instinctive mastery of form 
has alone caused his history to survive. He was not an investigator 
in the modern sense of the term, nor was he gifted with an intuitive 
historical instinct. Robertson had fair judgment and a well-developed 
though in no way remarkable sense of form ; but he lacked erudi- 
tion, and, as compared with Gibbon, for example, was content to 
accept his knowledge at second hand. Telling his story well, he 
was never master of his subject. 

Coming down to our own century, and speaking only of the 
dead, a series of familiar names at once suggest themselves, — Mit- 
ford, Grote and Thirlwall ; Arnold and Merivale ; Milman, Lingard, 
Hallam, Macaulay, Carlyle, Buckle, Froude, Freeman and Green, 
— naming only the more conspicuous. Mitford was no historian 
at all ; merely an historical pamphleteer. His judgment was inferior 
to his erudition even, and he had no sense of form. Grote was 
erudite, but he wrote in accordance with his political affinities, and 
what is called the spirit of the time and place ; and that time and 
place were not Greece, nor the third and fourth centuries before 
Christ. He had, moreover, no sense of literary form, for he put 
what he knew into twelve volumes, when human patience did not 
suffice for six. Thirlwall was erudite in a way, and a thinker and 
writer of unquestionable force ; but his work on Greece was written 
to order, and is what is known as a "standard history." Correct, 
but devoid of inspiration, it is slightly suggestive of a second-class 
epic. Arnold is typical of scholarship and insight ; his judgment is 
excellent ; but of literary art, so conspicuous in his son, there is no 
trace. Merivale is scholarly and academic. Milman was hampered 
by his church training, which fettered his judgment ; learned, as 
learning went in those days, there is in his writings nothing that 
would attract readers or students of a period later than his own. 
Lingard was another church historian. A correct writer, he tells 
England's story from the point of view of Rome. Hallam is 
deeply read, and judicial ; but the literarj' sense is conspicuously 
absent. His volumes are well-nigh unreadable. Freeman is the 
typical modern historian of the original-material-and-monograph 
school. He writes irrespective of the readers. Learned beyond 



2 1 8 C. F. Adams 

compare, he cumbers the shelves of our libraries with an accumula- 
tion of volumes which are not literature. 

Of Henry Thomas Buckle and of John Richard Green I will 
speak together, and with respectful admiration. Both were prema- 
turely cut off, almost in what with historical writers is the period of 
promise ; for, while Green at the time of his death was forty-seven. 
Buckle was not yet forty-one. What they did, therefore, — and they 
both did much, — was indicative only of what they might have done. 
Judged by that, — ex pcde Hciriileiii, — I hold that they come nearer 
to the ideal of what a twentieth-century historian should be than any 
other writers in our modern English tongue. That Buckle was 
crude, impulsive, hasty in generalization and paradoxical in judgment 
is not to be gainsaid ; but he wrote before Darwin ; and, when he 
published his history, he was but thirty-six. What might he not 
have become had he been favored with health, and lived to sixty ! 
Very different in organization, he and Green alike possessed in high 
degree the spirit of investigation and the historical insight, combined 
with a well-developed literaiy sense. Men of untiring research, 
they had the faculty of expression. Artists as well as scholars, they 
inspired. Their early death was in my judgment an irreparable loss 
to English historical lore and the best historical treatment. 

I come now to Macaulay, Carlyle and Froude, the three literary 
masters of the century who have dealt with history in the English 
tongue ; and I shall treat of them briefly, and in the inverse order. 
Froude is redeemed by a sense of literary form ; as an historian he 
was learned, but inaccurate, and his judgment was fatally defective. 
He was essentially an artist. Carlyle was a poet rather than an his- 
torian. A student, with the insight of a seer and a prophet's voice, 
his judgment was fatally biassed. A wonderful master of form, his 
writings will endure ; but rather as epics in prose than as historical 
monuments. Macaulay came, in my judgment, nearer than any 
other English writer of the century to the great historical stature ; 
but he failed to attain it. The cause of his failure is an instructive 
as well as an interesting study. 

Thomas Babington Macaulay is unquestionably the most popu- 
lar historian that ever wrote. His history, when it appeared, was 
the literary sensation of the day, and its circulation increased with 
each succeeding volume. Among historical works, it alone has in 
its vogue thrown into the shade the most successful novels of the 
century, — those of Scott, Thackeray and Dickens, Jane Eyre, 
Robert Elsmere, and even Richard Carvel, the last ephemeral sen- 
sation ; but, of the three great attributes of the historian, Macaulay 
was endowed with only one. He was a man of vast erudition ; and, 



Tae Sifted Grain and tJic Grain Sifters 2 1 9 

moreover, he was gifted with a phenomenal memory, wliich seemed 
to put at his immediate disposal the entire accumulation of his om- 
nivorous reading. His judgment was, however, defective ; for he 
was, from the very ardor of his nature," more or less of a partisan, 
while the wealth of his imagination and the exuberance of his rhet- 
oric were fatal to his sense of form. He was incomparably the 
greatest of historical raconteurs, but the fascination of the story 
overcame his sense of proportion, and he was buried under his own 
riches. For it is a great mistake to suppose, as so many do, that 
what is called style, no matter how brilliant, or how correct and 
clear, constitutes in itself literary form ; it is a large and indis- 
pensable element in literary form, but neither the whole, nor indeed 
the greatest part of it. The entire scheme, the proportion of the 
several parts to the whole and to each other, the grouping and the 
presentation, the background and the accessories constitute literary 
form ; the style of the author is merely the drapery of presentation. 
Here was where Macaulay failed ; and he failed on a point which 
the average historical writer, and the average historical instructor 
still more, does not as a rule even take into consideration. Macaulay's 
general conception of his scheme was so imperfect as to be practi- 
cally impossible ; and this he himself, when too late, sadly recog- 
nized. His interest in his subject and the warmth of his imagination 
swept him away, — they were too strong for his sense of proportion. 
Take, for instance, two such wonderful bits as his account of the trial 
of the seven bishops, and his narrative of the siege of Londonderry. 
They are masterpieces ; but they should be monographs. They are 
in their imagery and detail out of all proportion to any general his- 
torical plan. They imply a whole which would be in itself an his- 
torical library rather than a histoiy. On the matter of judgment it 
is not necessary to dwell. Macaulay's work is unquestionably his- 
tory, and history on a panoramic scale ; but the pigments he used 
are indisputably Whig. Yet his method was instinctively correct. 
He had his models and his scheme, — he made his preliminary 
studies, — he saw his subject as a whole, and in its several parts ; 
but he labored under two disadvantages : — in the first place, like 
Gibbon, he was born and wrote before the discoveries of Darwin had 

' " It is well to realize that this greatest history of modern times was written by one 
in whom a distrust in enthusiasm was deeply rooted. This cynicism was not inconsistent 
with partiality, with definite prepossessions, with a certain spite. • The conviction that 
enthusiasm is inconsistent with intellectual balance was engrained in his mental constitu- 
tion, and confirmed by study and experience. It might be reasonably maintained that 
zeal for men or causes is an historian's undoing, and that ' reserve sympathy ' — the prin- 
ciple of Thucydides — is the first lesson he has to learn." J. B. Uury, Introduction to 
his edition (1896) of Gibbon, I. lxvii.-lx%'iii. 



2 20 C. F. Adams 

given its whole great unity to history ; and, in the second place, he 
had not thought his plan fully out, subordinating severely to it both 
his imagination and his rhetoric. Accordingly, so far as literary 
form was concerned, his history, which in that respect above all 
should, with his classic training, have been an entire and perfect 
chrysolite, was in fact a monumental failure. It was not even a 
whole ; it was only a fragment. 

Coming now to our own American experience, and still speaking 
exclusively of the writings of the dead, it is not unsafe to say that 
there is as yet no American historical work which can call even for 
mention among those of the first class. The list can speedily be passed 
in review, — Marshall, Irving, Prescott, Hildreth, Bancroft, Motley, 
Palfrey and Parkman. Except those yet living, I do not recall any 
others who would challenge consideration. That Marshall was en- 
dowed with a calm, clear judgment, no reader of his judicial opin- 
ions would deny ; but he had no other attribute of an historian. 
He certainly was not historically learned, and there is no evidence 
that he was gifted with any sense of literary proportion. Irving 
was a born man of letters. With a charming style and a keen 
sense of humor, he was as an historical writer defective in judgment. 
Not a profound or accurate investigator, as became apparent in his 
Columbus and his Washington, his excellent natural literary sense 
was but partially developed. Perhaps he was born before his time ; 
perhaps his education did not lead him to the study of the best 
models ; but, however it came about, he failed, and failed indisput- 
ably, in form. Prescott was a species of historical pioneer, — -an 
adventurer in a new field of research and of letters. Not only was 
he, like Macaulay and the rest, born before Darwin and the other 
great scientific lights of the century had assigned to human history 
its unity, limits and significance, but Prescott was not a profound 
scholar, nor yet a thorough investigator ; his judgment was by no 
means either incisive or robust, and his style was elegant, as the 
phrase goes, rather than tersely vigorous. He wrote, moreover, of 
that which he never saw, or made himself thoroughly part of even 
in imagination. Laboring under great disadvantages, his course 
was infinitely creditable ; but his portrait in the gallery of historians 
is not on the eye line. Of Hildreth, it is hardly necessary to speak. 
Laborious and persevering, his investigation was not thorough ; in- 
deed he had not taken in the fundamental conditions of modern 
historical research. With a fatally defective judgment, he did not 
know what form was. 

George Bancroft was in certain ways unique, and, among writers 
and students, his name cannot be mentioned without respect. He 



The Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters 2 2 1 

was by nature an investigator. His learning and philosophy cannot 
be called sound, and his earlier manner was something to be for- 
ever avoided : but he was indefatigable as a collector, and his pa- 
tience knew no bounds. He devoted his life to his subject ; and 
his life came to a close while he was still dwelling on the prelim- 
inaries to his theme. A partisan, and writing in support of a pre- 
conceived theory, his judgment was necessarily biassed ; while, as 
respects literary form, though he always tended to what was bet- 
ter, he never even approximately reached what is best. He, too, 
like Macaulay, failed to grasp the wide and fundamental distinction 
between a proportioned and complete history and a thorough his- 
torical monograph. His monumental work, therefore, is neither 
the one nor the other. As a collection of monographs, it is too 
condensed and imperfect ; as a history-, it is cumbersome, and enters 
into unnecessary detail. 

From a literary point of view Motley is unquestionably the 
most brilliant of American historical writers. He reminds the 
reader of Froude. Not naturally a patient or profound investi- 
gator, he yet forced himself to make a thorough study of his great 
subject, and he was gifted with a remarkable descriptive power. 
A man of intense personality', he was, however, defective in judg- 
ment, if not devoid of the faculty. He lacked calmness and 
method. He could describe a siege or a battle with a vividness 
which, while it revealed the master, revealed also the historian's 
limitations. \\'ith a distinct sense of literary form, he was unable 
to resist the temptations of imagination and sympathy. His taste 
was not severe ; his temper the reverse of serene. His defects as 
an historian were consequently as apparent as are his merits as a 
writer. 

Of Palfrey, the historian, I would speak with the deep personal 
respect I entertained for the man. A typical New Englander, a 
victim almost of that "terrible New England conscience," he wrote 
the history of New England. A scholar in his way and the most 
patient of investigators, he had, as an historian, been brought up in 
a radically wrong school, that of New England theology. There 
was in him not a trace of the skeptic ; not a suggestion of the 
humorist or ea.sy-going philosopher. He wrote of New England 
from the inside and in close sympathy with it. Thus, as respects 
learning, care and accuracy', he was in no way deficient, while he 
was painstaking and conscientious in the extreme. His training and 
mental characteristics, however, impaired his judgment, and he was 
quite devoid of any sense of form. The investigator will always 
have recourse to his work ; but, as a guide, its value will pass 



222 C. F. Adams 

away with the traditions of the New England theological period. 
From the literary point of view the absence of all idea of proportion 
renders the bulk of what he wrote impossible for the reader. 

Of those I have mentioned, Parkman alone remains ; perhaps the 
most individual of all our American historians, the one tasting most 
racily of the soil. Parkman did what Prescott failed to do, what it 
was not in Prescott ever to do. He wrote from the basis of a per- 
sonal knowledge of the localities in which what he had to narrate 
occurred, and the characteristics of those with whom he undertook 
to deal. To his theme he devoted his entire life, working under 
difficulties even greater than those which so cruelly hampered Pres- 
cott. His patience under suffering was infinite ; his research was 
indefatigable. In this respect, he left nothing to be desired. While 
his historical judgment was better than his literary taste, his appre- 
ciation of form was radically defective. Indeed he seemed almost 
devoid of any true sense of proportion. The result is that he has 
left behind him a succession of monographs of more or less histor- 
ical value or literary interest, but no complete, thoroughly designed 
and carefully proportioned historical unit. Like all the others, his 
work lacks form and finish. 

The historical writers of more than an hundred years have thus 
been passed in hasty review, nor has any nineteenth-century compeer 
of Thucydides, Tacitus and Gibbon been found among those who 
have expressed themselves in the English tongue. Nor do I think 
that any such could be found in other tongues ; unless, perchance, 
among the Germans, Theodor Mommsen might challenge consider- 
ation. Of Mommsen's learning there can be no question. I do not 
think there can be much of his insight and judgment. The sole 
question would be as to his literary form ; nor, in that respect, judg- 
ing by the recollection of thirty years, do I think that, so far as his 
history of Rome is concerned, judgment can be lightly passed against 
him. But, on this point, the verdict of time only is final. Before 
that verdict is in his case rendered, another half-century of proba- 
tion must elapse.' 

' " C'est sous ces deux aspects — qui sont en rtalite les deux faces del' esprit de Momm- 
sen, le savant et le politique — qu'il convient d'etudier cet ouvrage. 

" Dans r expose scientifique de V Hisloire j?o;«a/«^ on ne salt ce qu'on doit le plus 
admirer, ou de la science colossale de I'auteur ou de I'art avec laquelle elle est mise en 
oeuvre. 

" Cetait une entreprise colossale que celle de resumer tous les travaux sur la matidre 
depuis Niebuhr. Mommsen lui-meme avait contribue a ce travail par la quantite fabu- 
leuse de memoires qu'il avait ecrits sur les points les plus speciaux du droit remain, de 
rarcheologie ou de I'histoire. Or tout cela est assimile d'une raaniere merveilleuse dans- 
une narration histori(|ue qui est un des chefs-d'ceuvre de I'historiographie. L'histoire 
romaine est une ceuvre extraordinaire dans sa condensation, comme il n'en existe nulle 



The Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters 223 

There is still something to be taken into consideration. I have 
as yet dealt only with the writers ; the readers remain. During the 
century now ending, what changes have here come about ? F"or 
one, I frankly confess myself a strong advocate of what is sometimes 
rather contemptuously referred to as the popularization of history. 
I have but a limited sympathy with those who, from the ethcreal- 
ized atmosphere of the cloister, whether monkish or collegiate, seek 
truth's essence and pure learning only, regardless of utility, of sym- 
pathy or of applause. The great historical writer, fully to accom- 
plish his mission, must, I hold, be in very close touch with the gen- 
eration he addresses. In other words, to do its most useful work, 
historical thought must be made to permeate what we are pleased to 
call the mass ; it must be infiltrated through that great body of the 
community which, moving slowly and subject to all sorts ol influ- 
ences, in the end shapes national destinies. The true historian, — 
he who most sympathetically, as well as correctly, reads to the 
present the lessons to be derived from the experience of the past, — 
I hold to be the only latter-day prophet. That man has a message 
to deliver ; but, to deliver it effectively, he must, like every success- 
ful preacher, understand his audience ; and, to understand it, he 
must either be instinctively in sympathy with it, or he must have 
made a study of it. Of those instinctively in sympathy, I do not 
speak. That constitutes genius, and genius is a law unto itself; but 
I do maintain that instructors in historj^ and historical writers who 
ignore the prevailing literary and educational conditions, therein 
make a great mistake. He fails fatally who fails to conform to his 
environment ; and this is no less true of the historian than of the 
novelist or politician. 

In other words, what have we to say of those who read ? What 
do we know of them ? Not much, I fancy. In spite of our public 
libraries, and in spite of the immensely increased diffusion of printed 

autre au raonde, enfermant dans des dimensions si restreintes (3 volumes in 8°) tant de 
choses et de si bonnes choses. Mommsen raconte d'une mani^re si attrayante que dds les 
premieres lignes vous etes entraine. Ses grands tableaux sur les premieres migrations des 
peuples en Italie, sur les debuts de Rome, sur les Etrusques, sur la domination des Hel- 
lenes en Italie ; ses chapitres sur les institutions romaines, le droit, la religion, Tarmie et 
art ; sur la vie ^conomique, ragriculture, I'industrie et le commerce ; sur le diveloppe- 
ment interieur de la politique romaine ; sur les Celtes et sur Carthage ; sur les peripities 
de la Revolution romaine depuis les Gracques a Jules Cesar ; sur I'Orient grec, la Maci- 
doine ; sur la soumission de la Gaule : tout cela forme un ensemble admirable. 

" Comme peintre de grands tablciux historiques, je ne vois parmi les historiens con- 
temporains qu'un homme qui puisse 4trc compare ;\ Mommsen, c'est Ernest Renan : c'est 
la meme louche large, le meme sens des proportions, le meme art de faire voir et de faire 
comprendre, de rendre vivantes les choses par les details typiques qui se gravent pour 
toujours dans la memoirc." Guilland, V AlUinagne NouvelU et ses Historiens (1900), 
pp. 121-122. 



2 24 C. F. Adams 

matter through the agency of those hbraries and of the press, what 
those who compose the great mass of the community are reading, 
what enters into their intellectual nutriment, and thence passes into 
the secretions of the body politic, — this, I imagine, is a subject 
chiefly of surmise. The field is one upon which I do not now pro- 
pose to enter. Too large, it is also a pathless wilderness. I would, 
however, earnestly commend it to some more competent treatment 
at an early convention of librarians or publishers. To-day we must 
confine ourselves to history. For what, in the way of history, is the 
demand ? Who are at present the popular historical writers ? How 
can the lessons of the past be most readily and most effectually 
brought home to the mind and thoughts of the great reading public, 
vastly greater and more intelligent now than ever before ? 

This is something upon which the census throws no light. There 
is a widespread impression among those more or less qualified to 
form an opinion that the general capacity for sustained reading and 
thinking has not increased or been strengthened with the passage of 
the years. On the contrary, the indications, it is currently sup- 
posed, are rather of emasculation. Everything must now be made 
easy and short. There is a constant demand felt, especially by our 
periodical press, for information on all sorts of subjects, — historical, 
philosophical, scientific, — but it must be set forth in what is known 
as a popular style, that is, introduced into the reader in a species of 
sugared capsule, and without leaving any annoying taste on the 
intellectual palate. The average reader, it is said, wants to know 
something concerning all the topics of the day ; but, while it is 
highly desirable he should be gratified in this laudable, though 
languid, craving, he must not be fatigued in the effort of acquisition, 
and he will not submit to be bored. It is then further argued that 
this was not the case formerly ; that in what are commonly alluded 
to as "the good old times," — always the times of the grand- 
parents, — people had fewer books, and fewer people read ; but those 
who did read, deterred neither by number of pages nor by dryness 
of treatment, were equal to the feat of reading. To-day, on the 
contrary, almost no one rises to more than a magazine article ; a 
volume appalls. 

This is an extremely interesting subject of inquiry, were the real 
facts only attainable. Unfortunately they are not. We are forced 
to deal with impressions ; and impressions, always vague, are usually 
deceptive. At the same time, when glimpses of a more or less re- 
mote past do now and again reach us, they seem to indicate mental 
conditions calculated to excite our special wonder. We do know, 
for instance, that in the olden days, — before public libraries and peri- 



The Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters 225 

odicals, and the modern cheap press and the Sunday newspaper 
were devised, — wlicn books were rarities, and reading a somewhat 
rare accomphshment, — the Bible, Shakespeare, Paradise Lost, the 
Pilgrim's Progress, and Robinson Crusoe, the Spectator and Taller, 
Barrow's Seniioiis and Hume's History of England were the stand- 
ard household and family literature ; and the Bible was read and 
reread until its slightest allusions passed into familiar speech. In- 
deed the Bible, in King James's version, may be said to have been 
for the great mass of the community, — those who now have recourse 
to the Sunday paper, — the sum and substance of English literature. 
In this respect it is fairly open to question whether the course of 
evolution has tended altogether toward improvement. Now and 
again, however, we get one of these retrospective glimpses which is 
simply bewildering, and while indulging in it, one cannot help pon- 
dering over the mental conditions which once apparently prevailed. 
The question suggests itself, were there giants in those days ? — or 
did the reader ask for bread, and did they give him a stone? We 
know, for instance, what the public library and circulating library 
of to-day are. VVe know, to a certain extent, what the reading de- 
mand is, and who the popular authors are. We know that, while 
history must content itself with a poor one in twenty, the call for 
works of fiction is more than a third of the whole, while nearly 
eighty per cent, of the ordinary circulation is made up of novels, 
story books for children, and periodicals. It is the lightest form of 
pabulum. This, in 1900. Now, let us get a glimpse of " the good 
old times." 

In the year 1790, a humorous rascal named Burroughs — once 
widely known as " the notorious Stephen Burroughs" — found him- 
self stranded in a town on Long Island, New York, a refugee from 
a Massachusetts gaol and whipping-post, the penalties incurred in or 
at both of which he had richly merited. In the place of his refuge, 
Burroughs served as the village schoolmaster ; and, being of an ob- 
servant turn of mind, he did not fail presently to note that the people 
of the place were " very illiterate," and almost entirely destitute of 
books of any kind, " except school books and bibles." Finding 
among the younger people of the community many " pos.sessing 
bright abilities and a strong thirst for information," Burroughs as- 
serts that he bestirred himself to secure the funds necessary to 
found the nucleus of a public library. Having in a measure suc- 
ceeded, a meeting of " the proprietors " was called " for the purpose 
of selecting a catalogue of books ; " and presently the different mem- 
bers presented lists " peculiar to their own tastes." Prior to this 
meeting it had been alleged that the people generally anticipated 



2 26 C. F. Adams 

that the books would be selected by the clergyman of the church, 
and would "consist of books of divinity, and dry metaphysical 
writings ; whereas, should they be assured that histories and books 
of information would be procured," they would have felt very dif- 
ferently. And now, when the lists were submitted, " Deacon 
Hodges brought forward ' Essays on the Divine Authority for 
Infant Baptism,' 'Terms of Church Communion,' 'The Careful 
Watchman,' 'Age of Grace,' etc. ; Deacon Cook's collection was 
' History of Martyrs,' ' Rights of Conscience,' ' Modern Pharisees,' 
' Defence of Separates ; ' Mr. Woolworth exhibited ' Edwards 
against Chauncy,' ' History of Redemption,' ' Jennings's Views,' 
etc. ; Judge Hurlbut concurred in the same ; Dr. Rose exhibited 
' Gay's Fables,' ' Pleasing Companion,' ' Turkish Spy,' while I," 
wrote Burroughs, " for the third time recommended 'Hume's His- 
tory,' 'Voltaire's Histories,' ' Rollin's Ancient History,' ' Plutarch's 
Lives,' etc." 

It would be difficult to mark more strikingly the development 
of a century, than by thus presenting Hume's History and Rollin as 
typical of what was deemed light and popular reading at one end of 
it, and the Sunday newspaper at the other. As I have already inti- 
mated, they were either giants in those days, or husks supplied milk 
for babes. Recurring, however, to present conditions, the popular 
demand for historical literature is undoubtedly vastly larger than it 
was a century ago ; nor is it by any means so clear as is usually 
assumed that the solid reading and thinking power of the com- 
munity has at all deteriorated. That yet remains to be proved. A 
century ago, it is to be borne in mind, there were no public libra- 
ries at all, and the private collections of books were comparatively 
few and small. It is safe, probably, to assume that there are a 
hundred, or even a thousand, readers now to one then. On this 
head nothing even approximating to what would be deemed con- 
clusive evidence is attainable; but the fair assumption is that, while 
the light and ephemeral, knowledge-made-easy reading is a develop- 
ment of these latter years, it has in no way displaced the more sus- 
tained reading and severe thought of the earlier time. On the con- 
trary, that also has had its share of increase. Take Gibbon, for 
instance. A few years ago, an acute and popular English critic, in 
speaking of the newly edited Memoirs of Gibbon, used this lan- 
guage : — "All readers of the Decline and Fall — that is to say, 
all men and women of a sound education," etc. If Mr. Frederic 
Harrison was correct in his generalization in 1896, certainly more 
could not have been said in 1796; and, during the intervening hun- 
dred years, the class of those who have, received "a sound educa- 



The Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters 227 

tion " has undergone a prodigious increase. Take Harvard College, 
for instance; in 1796 it graduated thirty-tliree students, and in 1896 
it graduated four hundred and eight, — an increase of more than 
twelvefold. In 1796, also,, there were not a tenth part of the in- 
stitutions of advanced education in the country which now exist. 
The statistics of the publishing houses and the shelves of the book- 
selling establishments all point to the same conclusion. Of course, 
it does not follow that because a book is bought it is also read ; but 
it is not unsafe to say that twenty copies of Gibbon's Decline and 
Fall are called for in the bookstores of to-day to one that was 
called for in 1800. 

On this subject, however, very instructive light may be derived 
from another quarter. I refer to the public library. While dis- 
cussing the question eighteen months ago, I ventured to state that, 
" in the case of one public library in a considerable Massachusetts 
city I had been led to conclude, as the result of examination and 
somewhat careful inquiry, that the copy of the Decline and Fall on 
its shelves had, in over thirty years, not once been consecutively 
read through by a single individual." I have since made further 
and more careful inquiry on this point from other, and larger, 
though similar institutions, and the inference I then drew has been 
confirmed and generalized. I have also sought information as to 
the demand for historical literature, and the tendency and character 
of the reading so far as it could be ascertained, or approximately in- 
ferred. I have submitted my list of historical writers, and inquired 
as to the call for them. Suggestive in all respects, the results 
have, in some, been little less than startling. Take for instance pop- 
ularity, and let me recur to Macaulay and Carlyle. I have spoken 
of the two as great masters in historical composition, — comparing 
them in their field to Turner and Millet in the field of art. Like 
Turner and Millet, they influenced to a marked extent a whole gen- 
eration of workers that ensued. To such an extent did they influ- 
ence it that a scholastic reaction against them set in, — a reaction as 
distinct as it was strong. Nevertheless, in spite of that reaction, to 
what extent did the master retain his popular hold ? I admit that 
my astonishment was great when I learned that between 1880, more 
than twenty years after his death, and 1900, besides innumerable 
editions issued on both sides of the Atlantic, the authorized London 
publishers of Macaulay had sold in two shapes only, — and they ap- 
pear in many other shapes, — 80,000 copies of his History and 90,000 
of his Miscellanies. Of Carlyle and the call for his writings I could 
gather no such specific particulars ; but in reply to my inquiries, I was 
generally advised that, while the English demand had been large, 



2 28 C. F. Adams 

there was no considerable American publisliing liouse which had 
not brought out partial or complete editions of his works. They 
also were referred to as "innumerable." ^ In other words, when a 
generation that knew them not had passed away, the works of the 
two great masters of historical literary form in our day sold beyond 
all compare with the productions of any of the living writers most 
in vogue ; and this while the professorial dry-as-dust reaction 
against those masters was in fullest swing. 

With a vast amount of material unused, and much still unsaid, I 
propose, in concluding, to trespass still further on your patience while 
I draw a lesson to which the first portion of my discourse will con- 
tribute not less than the second. A great, as well as a v&xy volumi- 
nous, recent historical writer has coined the apothegm, — " History 
is past politics, and politics are present History." The proposition 
is one I do not now propose to discuss, except to suggest that, how- 
ever it may have been heretofore, what is known as politics will be 
but a part, and by no means the most important part, of the history 
of the future. The historian will look deeper. It was President 
Lincoln who said in one of the few immortal utterances of the cen- 
tury, — an utterance, be it also observed, limited to two hundred and 
fifty words, — that this our nation was " conceived in liberty, and 
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal ; " and 
that it was for us highly to resolve " that government of the people, 
by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth." 
It was James Russell Lowell, who, when asked in Paris by the his- 
torian Guizot many years since, how long the Republic of the United 
States might reasonably be expected to endure, happily replied, — 
"So long as the ideas of its founders continue dominant." In the 
first place, I hold it not unsafe to saj' that, looking forward into a 
future not now remote, the mission of the Republic and the ideas of 
the founders will more especially rest in the hands of those agricul- 
tural communities of the Northwest, where great aggregations of a 
civic populace are few, and the principles of natural selection have 
had the fullest and the freest play in the formation of the race. Such 
is Wisconsin ; such Iowa ; such Minnesota. In their hands, and in 
the hands of commumties like them, will rest the ark of our covenant. 

'At least twenty (20) American publishing houses have brought out complete edi- 
tions of Macaulay, both his Miscellanies and the History of England. Many of these 
editions have been expensive, and they seem uniformly to have met with a ready demand. 
Almost every American publishing house of any note has brought out editions of some of 
the Essays. The same is, to a less extent, true of Carlyle. Seven (7) houses have 
brought out complete editions of his works; while three (3) others have put on the 
market imported editions, bearing an American imprint. Separate editions of the more 
popular of his writings — some cheap, others de luxe — have been brought out by nearly 
every American publishing concern. 



The Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters 229 

In the next place, for the use and future behoof of those com- 
munities I hold that the careful and intelligent reading of the his- 
torical lessons of the past is all important. Without that reading, 
and a constant emphasis laid upon its lessons, the nature of that 
mission and those ideas to which Lincoln and Lowell alluded can- 
not be kept fresh in mind. This institution I accordingly regard 
as the most precious of all Wisconsin's endowments of education. 
It should be the sheet-anchor by which, amid the storms and tur- 
bulence of a tempestuous future, the ship of state will be anchored 
to the firm holding-ground of tradition. It is to further this result 
that I to-day make appeal to the historian of the future. His, in 
this community, is a great and important mission ; a mission which 
he will not fulfil unless he to a large extent frees himself from the 
trammels of the past, and rises to an equality with the occasion. 
He must be a prophet and a poet, as well as an investigator and an 
annalist. He must cut loose from many of the models and most 
of the precedents of the immediate past, and the educational pre- 
cepts now so commonly in vogue. He must perplex the modern 
college professor by asserting that soundness is not always and 
of necessity dull, and that even intellectual sobriety may be carried 
to an excess. Not only is it possible for a writer to combine learn- 
ing and accuracy with vivacity, but to be read and to be popular 
should not in the eyes of the judicious be a species of stigma. 
Historical research may, on the other hand, result in a mere lumber 
of learning ; and, even in the portrayal of the sequence of events, 
it is to a man's credit that he should strive to see things from the 
point of view of an artist, rather than, looking with the dull eye 
of a mechanic, seek to measure them with the mechanic's twelve- 
inch rule. I confess myself weary of those reactionary influences 
amid which of late we have lived. I distinctly look back with 
regret to that more spiritual and more confident time when we 
of the generation now passing from the stage drew our inspiration 
from prophets, and not from laboratories. So to-day I make bold 
to maintain that the greatest benefactor America could have — far 
more immediately influential than any possible President or senator 
or peripatetic political practitioner, as well as infinitely more so in a 
remote future — would be some historical writer, occupying perhaps 
a chair here at Madison, who would in speech and book explain 
and expound, as they could be explained and expounded, the les- 
sons of American history and the fundamental principles of Ameri- 
can historical faith. 

It was Macaulay who made his boast that, disregarding the tra- 
ditions which constituted what he contemptuously termed " the dig- 



230 C. F. Ada7ns 

nity of history," he would set forth England's story in so attractive 
a form that his volumes should displace the last novel from the work- 
table of the London society girl. And he did it. It is but the other 
day that an American naval officer suddenly appeared in the field of 
historical literature, and, by two volumes, sensibly modified the 
policy of nations. Here are precept and example. To accomplish 
similar results should, I hold, be the ambition of the American his- 
torian. Popularity he should court as a necessary means to an end ; 
and that he should attain popularity, he must study the art of pres- 
entation as much and as thoughtfully as he delves amid the original 
material of history. Becoming more of an artist, rhetorician and 
philosopher than he now is, he must be less of a pedant and color- 
less investigator. In a word, going back to Moses, Thucydides and 
Herodotus ; Tacitus, Gibbon and Voltaire ; Niebuhr, Macaulay, 
Carlyle, Buckle, Green, Mommsen and Froude, he must study their 
systems, and, avoiding the mistakes into which they fell, thought- 
fully accommodating himself to the conditions of the present, he 
must prepare to fulfil the mission before him. He will then in time 
devise what is so greatly needed for our political life, the distinctively 
American historical method of the future. Of this we have as yet 
had hardly the promise, and that only recently through the pages 
of Fiske and Mahan ; and I cannot help surmising that it is to some 
Eastern seed planted here in the freer environment of the more fruit- 
ful West that we must look for its ultimate realization. 

Charles Francis Adams. 

Appendix. 

The full record of J. Q. Adams's utterances on this most important 
subject has never been made up. (See JForis of Charles Sumner, VI. 
19-23, VII. 142.) Historically speaking, it is of exceptional signifi- 
cance : and, accordingly, for convenience of reference, a partial record 
is here presented. 

In 1836 Mr. Adams represented in Congress what was then the Mass- 
achusetts "Plymouth" district. In April of that year the issue, which, 
just twenty-five years later, was to result in overt civil war, was fast assum- 
ing shape ; for on the 21st of the month, the battle of San Jacinto was 
fought, resulting immediately in the independence of Texas, and more 
remotely in its annexation to the United States and the consequent war 
of spoliation (1846-48) with Mexico. At the same time petitions in 
great number were pouring into Congress from the Northern states ask- 
ing for the abolition of slavery, and the prohibition of the domestic 
slave-trade in the District of Columbia ; the admission into the Union of 
Arkansas, with a constitution recognizing slavery, was also under considera- 
tion. In the course of a long personal letter dated April 4, 1836, written 



TJie Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters 2 3 1 

to the Hon. Solomon Lincoln, of llingham, a prominent constituent 
of his, Mr. Adams made the following incidental reference to the whole 
subject, indicative of the degree to which the question of martial law as a 
possible factor in the solution of the ])roblcm then occupied his mind : 

"The new pretentions of the Slave representation in Congress, of a 
right to refuse to receive Petitions, and that Congress have no Constitu- 
tional power to abolish slavery or the slave trade in the District of Colum- 
bia forced upon me so much of the discussion as I did take upon me, but 
in which you are well aware I did not and could not speak a tenth 
part of my mind. I did not, for example, start the question whether by 
the Law of God and of Nature man can hold property, hereditary prop- 
erty in man — I did not start the question whether in the event of a 
servile insurrection and War, Congress would not have complete, unlim- 
ited control over the whole subject of slavery even to the emancipation 
of all the slaves in the State where such insurrection should break out, 
and for the suppression of which the freemen in Plymouth and Norfolk 
Counties, Massachusetts, should be called by Acts of Congress to pour 
out their treasures and to shed their blood. Had I spoken my mind on 
those two points the sturdiest of the abolitionists would have disavowed 
the sentiments of their champion." 

A little more than seven weeks after thus writing, Mr. Adams made 
the following entries in his diary : 

May 2jf/t. "At the House, the motion of Robertson, to recommit 
Pinckney's slavery report, with instructions to report a resolution de- 
claring that Congress has no constitutional authority to abolish slavery 
in the District of Columbia, as an amendment to the motion for print- 
ing an extra number of the report, was first considered. Robertson fin- 
ished his speech, which was vehement. . . . 

" Immediately after the conclusion of Robertson's speech I addressed 
the Speaker, but he gave the floor to Owens, of Georgia, one of the 
signing members of the committee, who moved the previous question, 
and refused to withdraw it. It was seconded and carried, by yeas and 
nays. . . . 

" The hour of one came, and the order of the day was called — a joint 
resolution from the Senate, authorizing the President to cause rations to 
be furnished to suffering fugitives from Indian hostilities in Alabama and 
Georgia. Committee of the whole on the Union, and a debate of five 
hours, in which I made a speech of about an hour, wherein I opened the 
whole subject of the Mexican, Indian, negro, and English war." 

It was in the course of this speech that Mr. Adams first enunciated 
the principle of emancipation through martial law, exercised under the 
Constitution in time of war. He did so in the following passage : 

" Mr. Chairman, are you ready for all these wars? A Mexican war? 
A war with Great Britain if not with France? A general Indian war? 
A servile war? And, as an inevitable consequence of them all, a civil 
war? For it must ultimately terminate in a war of colors as well as of 
races. And do you imagine that, while with your eyes open you are 
wilfully kindling, and then closing your eyes and blindly rushing into 
them ; do you imagine that while in the very nature of things, your own 



232 C. F. Adams 

Southern and Southwestern States must be the Flanders of these compli - 
cated wars, the battlefield on which the last great battle must be fought 
between slavery and emancipation ; do you imagine that your Congress 
will have no constitutional authority to interfere with the institution of 
slavery in any ivay in the States of this Confederacy ? Sir, they must 
and will interfere with it — perhaps to sustain it by war; perhaps to 
abolish it by treaties of peace ; and they will not only possess the con- 
stitutional power so to interfere, but they will be bound in duty to do it 
by the express provisions of the Constitution itself From the instant 
that your slaveholding States become the theatre of war, civil, servile or 
foreign, from that instant the war powers of Congress extend to inter- 
ference with the institution of slavery in every way in which it can be 
interfered with, from a claim of indemnity for slaves taken or destroyed, 
to the cession of the State burdened with slavery to a foreign power." 

The following references to this speech are then found in the diary : 

May 2gth. — ^" I was occupied all the leisure of the day and evening 
in writing out for publication my speech made last Wednesday in the 
House of Representatives — one of the most hazardous that I ever made, 
and the reception of which, even by the people of my own district and 
State, is altogether uncertain." 

June 2d. — " My speech on the distribution of rations to the fugitives 
from Indian hostilities in Alabania and Georgia was published in the 
National Intelligencer of this morning, and a subscription paper was 
circulated in the House for printing it in a pamphlet, for which Gales 
told me there were twenty-five hundred copies ordered. Several members 
of the House of both parties spoke of it tome, some with strong dissent." 

June igtJi.^' My speech on the rations comes back with echoes of 
thundering vituperation from the South and West, and with one universal 
shout of applause from the North and East. This is a cause upon which 
I am entering at the last stage of life, and with the certainty that I cannot 
advance in it far ; my career must close, leaving the cause at the threshold. 
To open the way for others is all that I can do. The cause is good and 
great." 

So far as the record goes, the doctrine was not again propounded by 
Mr. Adams until 1841. On the 7th of June of that year he made a speech 
in the House of Representatives in support of a motion for the repeal of the 
Twenty-first Ruleofthe House, commonly knownas " the Atherton Gag." 
Of this speech, no report exists ; but in the course of it he again enunciated 
the martial law theory of emancipation. The next day he was followed 
in debate by C. J. Ingersoll, of Pennsylvania, Chairman of the Committee 
on Foreign Affairs, who took occasion to declare that what he had heard 
the day previous had made his "blood curdle with horror." 

" Mr. Adams here rose in explanation, and said he did not say that 
in the event of a servile war or insurrection of slaves, the Constitution of 
the United States would be at an end. What he did say was this, that 
in the event of a servile war or insurrection of slaves, if the people of the 
free States were called upon to suppress the insurrection, and to spend 
their blood and treasure in putting an end to the war — a war in which 
the distinguished Virginian, the author of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, had said that ' God has no attribute in favor of the master' — 



The Sifted Grain and the Graiti Sifters 233 

then he would not say that Congress might not interfere with the institu- 
tion of slavery in the States, and that, through the treaty-making poroer, 
universal emancipation might not be the result." 

The following year the contention was again discussed in the course 
of the memorable debate on the " Haverhill Petition." Mr. Adams was 
then bitterly assailed by Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, and Thomas F. 
Marshall, of Kentucky. Mr. Adams at the time did not reply to them 
on this head ; but, on the 14th of the following April, occasion offered, 
and he then once more laid down the law on the subject, as he under- 
stood it, and a.s it was subsequently put in force : — 

"I would leave that institution to the exclusive consideration and 
management of the States more peculiarly interested in it, just as long 
as they can keep within their own bounds. So far I admit that Congress 
has no power to meddle with it. As long as they do not step out of 
their own bounds, and do not put the question to the people of the 
United States, whose peace, welfare, and happiness are all at stake, so 
long I will agree to leave them to themselves. But when a member from 
a free State brings forward certain resolutions, for which, instead of rea- 
soning to disprove his positions, you vote a censure upon him, and that 
without hearing, it is quite another affair. At the time this was done I 
said that, as far as I could understand the resolutions proposed by the 
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Giddings), there were some of them for 
which I was ready to vote, and some which I must vote against ; and I 
will now tell this House, my constituents, and the world of mankind, 
that the resolution against which I should have voted was that in which 
he declares that what are called the slave States have the exclusive right 
of consultation on the subject of slavery. For that resolution I never 
would vote, because Iibelieve that it is not just, and does not contain 
constitutional doctrine. I believe that so long as the slave States are 
able to sustain their institutions without going abroad or calling upon 
other parts of the Union to aid them or act on the subject, so long I 
will consent never to interfere. 

" I have said this, and I repeat it ; but if they come to the free States 
and say to them you must help us to keep down our slaves, you must aid 
us in an insurrection and a civil war, then I say that with that call comes 
a full and plenary power to this House and to the Senate over the whole 
subject. It is a war power. I say it is a war power, and when your 
country is actually in war, whether it be a war of invasion or a war of 
insurrection, Congress has power to carry on the war, and must carry it 
on according to the laws of war ; and by the laws of war an invaded 
country has all its laws and municipal institutions swept by the board, 
and martial law takes the place of them. This power in Congress has, 
perhaps, never been called into exercise under the present Constitution 
of the L'nited States. But when the laws of war are in force, what, I 
ask, is one of those laws? ' It is this: that when a country is invaded, 
and two hostile armies are set in martial array, the commanders of both 
armies have power to emancipate all the slaves in the invaded territory. 
Nor is this a mere theoretic statement. The history of South America 
shows that the doctrine has been carried into practical execution within 
the last thirty years. Slavery was abolished in Colombia, first, by the 
Spanish General, Morillo, and, secondly, by the American General, Bol- 
ivar. It was abolished by virtue of a military command given at the 



2 34 C. F. Adams 

head of the army, and its abolition continues to be law to this day. It 
was abolished by the laws of war, and not by municipal enactments ; 
the power was exercised by military commanders under instructions, of. 
course, from their respective Governments. And here I recur again to the 
example of General Jackson. What are you now about in Congress ? You 
are passing a grant to refund to General Jackson the amount of a certain 
fine imposed upon him by a Judge under the laws of the State of Louisiana. 
You are going to refund him the money, with interest ; and this you are 
going to do because the imposition of the fine was unjust. And why was 
it unjust ? Because General Jackson was acting under the laws of war, and 
because the moment you place a military commander in a district which 
is the theatre of war, the laws of war apply to that district. . . . 

" I might furnish a thousand proofs to show that the pretensions of 
gentlemen to the .sanctity of their municipal institutions under a state of 
actual invasion and of actual war, whether servile, civil, or foreign, is 
wholly unfounded, and that the laws of war do, in all such cases, take 
the precedence. I lay this down as the law of nations. I say that the 
military authority takes for the time the place of all municipal institu- 
tions, and slavery among the rest ; and that, under that state of things, 
so far from its being true that the States where slavery exists have the 
exclusive management of the subject, not only the President of the 
United States but the commander of the army has power to order the 
universal emancipation of the slaves. I have given here more in detail 
a principle which I have asserted on this floor before now, and of which 
I have no more doubt, than that you. Sir, occupy that Chair. I give it 
in its development, in order that any gentleman from any part of the 
Union may, if he thinks proper, deny the truth of the position, and may 
maintain his denial ; not by indignation, not by passion and fury, but 
by sound and sober reasoning from the laws of nations and the laws of 
war. And if my position can be answered and refuted, I shall receive 
the refutation with pleasure ; I shall be glad to listen to reason, aside, as 
I say, from indignation and passion. And if by the force .of reasoning 
my understanding can be convinced, I here pledge myself to recant what 
I have asserted. 

" Let my position be answered ; let me be told, let my constituents 
be told, the people of my State be told, — a State whose soil tolerates not 
the foot of a slave, — that they are bound by the Constitution to a long 
and toilsome march under burning summer suns and a deadly Southern 
clime for the suppression of a servile war ; that they are bound to leave 
their bodies to rot upon the sands of Carolina, to leave their wives and 
their children orphans ; that those who cannot march are bound to pour 
out their treasures while their sons or brothers are pouring out their 
blood to suppress a servile, combined with a civil or a foreign war, and 
yet there exists no power beyond the limits of the slave State where such 
war is raging to emancipate the slaves. I say, let this be proved — I am 
open to conviction ; but until that conviction comes I put it forth not as 
a dictate of feeling, but as a settled maxim of the laws of nations, that in 
such a case the military supersedes the civil power." 

The only comment on this utterance made by Mr. Adams in his 
diary was the following: — "My speech on this day stung the slave- 
ocracy to madness." 

Here the proposition rested until 1861, when the course of events 
brought into forcible application the principles abstractly enunciated 
twenty years before by Mr. Adams. 



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